There are issues that make Staten Island feel like a separate city, and then there are the ones that make it feel like a forgotten one. The streetlight at Cromwell Avenue and Jefferson Street in Dongan Hills belongs to the second category. It has been out since August, and on Friday it served as the backdrop for a press conference by the borough’s Republican delegation, which was there to argue that it is far from the only one.
“This is an unacceptable status quo,” City Council Minority Leader David Carr, the Mid-Island Republican, said at the corner, according to the Staten Island Advance/SILive. Repairs, he said, used to take “two to four weeks.” His office alone has fielded about 70 complaints. The Department of Transportation, he said, had attributed the delays to a contractor problem, and a new company has since been hired.
The delegation turns out
Carr was joined by three Republican members of the Assembly, Michael Tannousis of the East Shore and southern Brooklyn, Michael Reilly of the South Shore and Sam Pirozzolo of the Mid-Island, along with representatives of Rep. Nicole Malliotakis and Council Member Frank Morano. The tone was exasperated but disciplined, which is the house style of Staten Island Republicanism when it has a good issue.
Tannousis brought up the city’s speed cameras and urged it to “concentrate on the basics.” Reilly invoked the city’s Vision Zero street-safety program and warned about “car hoppers,” the thieves who work their way down a street trying door handles. Pirozzolo addressed the mayor by name: “Mayor Mamdani, Staten Island is in the dark,” he said, asking him to “shine a little bit of light.”
It is, of course, also little more than a week before Election Day, and early voting began Saturday. That does not make the complaint less real. Streetlights are the rare municipal issue on which residents need no briefing, and the borough’s Republicans have long argued that Staten Island receives less than its share of the city’s attention. A broken light on a corner makes the argument more efficiently than any white paper.
What residents say, and what the numbers show
The complaints predate the press conference. A SILive analysis of 311 data published October 15 counted 210 streetlight complaints on Staten Island in a single seven-day period, 189 of them for a single light out and 15 for multiple lights, roughly 29 percent above the preceding weeks. Elna Johnson, 82, of Port Richmond told the outlet she had called 311 five times. “I don’t really want to go out at night,” she said. Mark Teitler, 57, of Sunnyside put it most precisely: “It’s about the feeling of safety.”
Here the stories diverge. Borough President Vito Fossella’s office, in a statement to SILive, attributed the backlog to delays in the DOT’s contractor agreements. Reilly was more specific: “For a period of time, there was no contractor in place,” he told the outlet. The DOT disputes that there was any lapse in coverage. “New Yorkers deserve safe, well-lit streets,” the department said, adding that “every reported outage is assessed within 10 days” and that outages are closed in an average of 15 days.
Both accounts can be partly true; a contractor can be technically in place and still not be fixing lights. The public record offers one clue. City procurement data compiled by Databook lists a contract for the maintenance of street lights on Staten Island awarded to Miller Pipeline LLC, worth about $12.8 million, with a term that began August 1, 2026 and runs through July 31, 2028. It was a competitive sealed bid, with an award notice dated July 20. The database showed no spending recorded against the contract yet, though city payment records often lag the work.
A contract beginning in August, when the Cromwell Avenue light went out, is consistent with a changeover. It does not prove a gap, and the DOT says there was none. But it suggests that the island’s dark corners have coincided with a handoff between maintenance contractors, which is the kind of transition that tends to produce backlogs whether anyone admits it or not.
The basics, again
Streetlights are the potholes of the night: unglamorous, universal and politically unforgiving. The DOT’s borough commissioner, Roseanne Caruana, now has a new contractor, a busy 311 queue and a Republican delegation with every incentive to keep counting.
The useful thing the department could do is the simplest: publish, by block, how many outages are open and how old they are, and let Staten Islanders judge whether the new contract is working. Until then, the borough will measure it the old-fashioned way, by looking out the window.
Featured image: Assemblymember Michael Reilly of Staten Island at a Staten Island Railway event in 2023. Photo by Metropolitan Transportation Authority via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.
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